Jeb Bush: Gun control advocates "acting on their heart"
People calling for increased gun control in the wake of a shooting at a community college campus in Roseburg, Oregon are "acting on their heart," Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush said, but the focus should be on mental health.
The former Florida governor, sat for an interview with CBS News Chief White House Correspondent Major Garrett Wednesday that covered possible gun legislation and the conflict in Syria.
Bush came under fire for saying "stuff happens" after the shooting, but he says that both President Obama and Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton took his words out of context.
"The first thing I said, was that my heart goes out the people that lost their lives, and the community will be altered for a lifetime. We need to deal with the mental health challenges that exist...then I talked about a broader subject," he said.
Garrett asked him to respond to the families of the shooting victims who are pushing for lawmakers to respond with more gun control.
"To them you say, what - you're being irrational?" Garrett asked.
"What I am saying is I know they are acting on their heart. Of course they are," Bush said. "Name a case where gun rights being restricted out of Washington would have changed the course of any of those cases. The challenge is to identify what the problem is. And I would say the bigger problem now is we have that have growing despair, that are isolated from society, they are disconnected from the rest of us and spiral out of control and then commit these atrocious acts of violence and in many cases commit suicide."
The answer, he said, is to reform the mental health system in a way that allows for earlier identification of people who are struggling while ensuring their privacy rights are protected.
"That would be something that I think people's energies ought to be focused on," he said.
Garrett also asked him about his fellow Republican candidate, Ben Carson, who said this week that people should attack a shooter because "he can only shoot one of us at a time."
"I think we ought to focus on the tragedy and show compassion for the people that are truly hurting all around this country with these acts and figure ways from the bottom up how we can solve it. I don't quite understand what [Carson] means," Bush said.
He was more open to Carson's suggestion to arm kindergarten teachers.
"If a community wants to try that, fine. But it should not be imposed from Washington, DC that every school have prohibitions or allowing for guns. This should be decided in the state legislatures," Bush said. But he added that proposals like that are "secondary" to the mental health challenges.
On Syria, Bush joined several of his GOP colleagues in calling for a no-fly zone to aid refugees and the rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, especially now that he has support from the Russian military.
"We need to create a no-fly zone. And make it clear that we're engaged in this and that we bring parties together," Bush said.
"A no-fly zone that includes the Russians?" Garrett asked.
"That would be fantastic - but to begin with a no-fly zone over the areas where we're supporting remnants of the Free Syrian Army - how about starting there?" he said.
He argued that the intractable conflict is due, at least in part, to U.S. inaction on Syria.
"We have to re-engage," he said. "You think that people are willing to risk war if the U.S. acts as the U.S. has traditionally acted? I doubt it. "
He said he doesn't believe the U.S. needs to threaten Russian President Vladimir Putin to get him out of the region, but rather make it clear that the U.S. wants to bring about peaceful change in Syria and that the Assad regime must go.
"We don't have to be the world's policeman, and we need to have a strategy. It ought to be clear and transparent, and right now none of that is happening, and Russia has filled that void," he said.